


I Am Playing Video Games, and I am Am Thinking About Time

by DetournementArc



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:01:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26658619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetournementArc/pseuds/DetournementArc
Summary: Rambling about Gamecubes, memory, gender, capitalism, adulthood, and solidarity in the morass of Pandemic Time.





	I Am Playing Video Games, and I am Am Thinking About Time

I am playing Mario Sunshine, and I am thinking about time.

It is one of my favorite games, and I wonder how much of it comes from nostalgia. Mid 2000s vintage, Gamecube games and Teen Titans on Toonami and the Mall of America when Capitalism meant consumerist bombast, not buying self-help, self-care, self-optimization because it couldn't yet afford to own you, so it sold to you instead.

I feel like a living archive of nostalgia. Pearls of memory lined up in a row inside my head. I feel at once like a tragic thing cloistering the past, and a brilliant monument to my own life. Chunks of time, even time I remember hating, get sanded down, sifted through for precious feelings, heuristic bouillons of concentrated sentiment. Early 2000s mall trips, mid 2000s hangouts at my best friend's house, early 2010s spent ending out high school and bumming out in a mire of aimlessness I can still pluck bright memories from, late 2010s finally moved out and free.

There's an election in a little over a month. I do not plan beyond it, because I softly assume I'm just going to die. This, of course, is melodramata, a way to take the burden of thinking of the future and offloading it down a cliff. Since the pandemic started, I have been a Schrodinger's cat, at once evidently fine and alive, yet always on the cusp of death, sitting inside of my box, waiting for it to open and to see what truth is observed once the impossible mathematics of electrons resolve under scrutiny. So I feel at once like time has stopped, and that it is slipping away.

For a long time, I felt ashamed of nostalgia. I wanted to escape it, wanted to turn towards the future with the same hope the past held for me. But what was that nostalgia? There's no winding back to childhood that doesn't push my parents back through arduous work to keep my brother and I fed and comfortable, there's no winding back to the Bush-era without Muslims being vilified, phones being tapped, and the foundations of the current political nightmare we're living in being laid. I turn forward, and the future crumbles under climate catastrophe and racist cops and fascist militias, there's an abyss where the next year, the next decade should be.

I think again about the Mall of America as I remember it when I worked there less than a year ago. I think about Adult Coloring Books, and articles on burnt-out Millennials "Adulting" from half a decade ago. I think about Nineties Kids, and about nostalgia again. I think my generation is still using memory to run from the Abyss, I think my generation flees back to childhood because we were propagandized to give up our adulthoods.

I remember Kickstarter taking off in the 2010s at the same time I was imagining my first move-out. Independent creators running from venture capital and me running to that storied Somewhere Else, all of us scrambling for shelter in the storm. I remember Obama-era optimism and imagining becoming some Boheme that found true meaning Somewhere Else.

I spent years wondering what an adult was. A child even among children, my immaturity was commented on often growing up. People always saw me as younger that I was when they met me in person. So I looked. To toxic masculinity, to elders, to Self-Help; and it all rang hollow as old men sneered at children in ICE camps, as the Self-Help books and the gender labels imagined nothing beyond chasing domination and profit. I tried turning to art, but in the end, even that melted down to chasing a job, chasing trends. None of this even considers the atemporality of being a Millennial, living through a pandemic, or considerations of shifting gender and the prospect of a Second Puberty- another past to be nostalgic for someday.

I work for a union now. It's pretty rote work, and it won't last beyond the election, but it's keeping me afloat. I got it through a friend in the same socialist org as me. They talk about God and Grace, and I don't know if I believe in a God, but it hurts less to think of one that the fascists don't own, about the God that liberates those under the Pharoah instead of burning the heretics in the Crusade. Not the writhing body of Yaldabaoth or the mad eyes of Saturn plastered on the walls by Goya going deaf in his collapsing democracy, but a feeling like love too big for the ego to carry.

When I am not at work, or playing video games, I attend trainings over Zoom. We talk about labor organizing, about solidarity and struggle, about standing and fighting for a future instead of fleeing to the past. I am surrounded by people in fights so vital, so vast, and yet seemingly, so possible. These people are the knights of Kierkegaard and Camus's Sisyphus, they are diving headfirst into the abyss of the future like, and they will carry the world up by the sweat of their brows. We are going to carry the world up. We are so many small hands in fists aimed at a paper tiger bigger than the sky.

I remember falling in love as a kid, as a boy, as a man, as a function of a perceived gender role, turning women into another Somewhere Else. This feels different. There's something deep and red, somewhere between the heart and the stomach, a feeling drumming up like the torque of an engine. It's almost like hope.

I think this is what Future Nostalgia feels like, I think this is what Adulthood is.

Art never made me feel this way.


End file.
